“Do you understand!!?”
“Yes, sir!” Their reply rattled the windows.
“Get your disgusting bodies off my bus!”
A third of the way back, a tall recruit with wavy dark hair and green eyes did exactly as he was told and moved down the aisle at a pace “one step faster than a walk and one step slower than a run” off the bus to the yellow footprints.
The barking continued into the night, with constant correction for stance, posture, and the slightest wrong answers. A kid standing to the left of the green-eyed recruit began to sniff, drawing the immediate ire of one of the drill instructors. The green-eyed recruit stared at the back of the recruit in front of him, arms crossed over his chest. He’d discussed military discipline many times over his short lifetime with his father and grandfather. He could do this.
More instruction happened on the footprints, along with a lot of kneeling, standing — while being instructed with copious yelling and barking from what felt like one drill instructor for every recruit. No movement was fast enough. No reply loud enough. No infraction or slip went unnoticed.
The recruits were power-walked with “speed and intensity” inside to the contraband room, where they dumped the contents of their pockets into red wooden cubicles for inspection and eventual storage. The Marine Corps would supply them with everything they needed during boot camp.
Eventually, the stunned recruits were ordered to “cover-down” on one of the white phones along the wall. There they would have two attempts to contact a family member or, if they had no family, their recruiter.
The green-eyed recruit had known all along he would have to make the phone call, and of all the events since getting on the bus at the San Diego airport, he dreaded this the most.
Fortunately, his mother did not answer. Other recruits covering down in line directly behind him screamed in response to commands from the drill instructors, making it impossible to think clearly. Then, to his relief, the second number he called went straight to voicemail, so he read the message from the printed script that was posted above the phone. He hung up, relieved to return to the world of screaming drill instructors.
They weren’t half as terrifying as his mom.
74
John Clark stepped off the California Zephyr in Fraser/Winter Park, Colorado, the next station west of the Moffat Tunnel. The scenery was spectacular, so several people exited even for the short duration of the stop, allowing Clark to slip away unnoticed before the train pulled away. He’d cleaned up the glass in the corridor and pulled the curtain to Kang’s compartment, so, with any luck, the train would be a few stops down the line before anyone found the body.
He rented a car from a company in nearby Granby, and sat down to check his voicemail while he waited for it to be delivered at a Mexican restaurant a kilometer from the train station.
There’d been no cell service from shortly after Denver, so he had more than a dozen messages. Most were of no consequence, a few would require a call back, but the last one caught him by surprise. He listened to it three times, at first stunned, then proud, then, he had to admit, a little teary-eyed.
“Hello!” the message began, hoarse, but intense. “This is Recruit Chavez. I have arrived safely at MCRD San Diego. The next time I contact you will be by postal mail, so expect a letter from me in two to three weeks. I love you. Good-bye.”
Clark listened to the message two more times, then hit speed dial for Ding’s cell. He was too much of a coward to talk to his daughter at the moment.
“Mr. C!” Chavez said. “You okay? We’ve been—”
“Hey, Ding,” Clark said, cutting him off. He took a deep breath. “Listen, bud, I just got an interesting phone call from my grandson. I’m thinking he’s put Stanford on the back burner for a while…”
David Huang was pressing a shirt in the laundry room at the back of his house when he heard his wife scream. He smiled, turning off the iron, and started immediately up the hall. Michelle Chadwick had dropped off the face of the earth, but that was to be expected. She’d been under tremendous stress, and they could both use a break from each other. She’d be back. Her political career depended on it.
His cell phone rang, but he ignored it. His wife needed him to take care of whatever spider she’d happened to encounter. He’d just passed the hall closet when she screamed again.
Huang froze when he entered his kitchen and found six heavily armed men in green uniforms and body armor. FBI HRT was emblazoned across their uniforms. The apparent supervisor gave a nod. Two of the agents grabbed him by each arm, helping him none too gently to his kitchen floor, while a third secured his cell phone and slipped it into a Faraday envelope.
From the corner of his eye, he saw a female agent usher his wife and daughter out the front door.
“She doesn’t know anything!” he shouted, hoping his wife would hear.
“Do not speak,” the team leader said, his tone direct, matter-of-fact.
Hands secured behind his back with nylon restraints, Huang was set in one of his kitchen chairs while a team of plainclothes agents began to search every square inch of his house, including behind the faceplates of each light switch and electric outlet.
Ten minutes into the search, the kitchen door opened and Michelle Chadwick walked in.
“Senator,” he said, glaring. “This will not turn out well.”
“For you,” Chadwick said. “Oh, you mean that fake video you’re trying to frame me with. I told President Ryan about that about two minutes into our first meeting. Who do you think you’re dealing with here, sport? It’s Rule Thirty-Four, you know.”
“What does that even mean?” Huang asked, incredulous that this pitiful woman would be so forward with him.
“If it exists, there’s probably porn of it. Good Lord, David, there are so many deepfake videos going around nowadays, that shoddy piece of trash will only help my reputation.”
“You’re supporting Jack Ryan now?”
“Not at all,” Chadwick said. “But it turns out, if I’m going to have an enemy, I’d rather it be you than my own government.”
75
So,” Cathy said, her head resting against Ryan’s chest. “I still can’t get my mind around the fact that Michelle Chadwick was never a spy.” She smelled like peppermint and Dioressence. A good pairing, Jack thought.
“Nope,” he said. “A true-blue patriot… who still hates my guts.”
Cathy patted his stomach. “I love your guts.”
“Means a lot, Doc,” Ryan said.
“What’s Father Pat thinking, going back to Indonesia?”
“That’s the way callings are, I guess,” Ryan said.
“Terrible about PFC Geddis,” Cathy whispered.
Ryan breathed deeply, feeling guilty for being in his comfortable bed while he spoke of such sacrifice. “I know. Sounds like he put himself in danger so the rest of his squad could get safely off the rope.”
“And now Ding’s son is joining the Marine Corps?”
“I know,” Ryan said again.
“I’ll bet Patsy’s freaked about it,” Cathy said.
“And proud,” Ryan said. “I talked to John on the phone. Apparently, JP has been talking to him a lot lately about becoming a SEAL. He thought the Marine Corps would get him ready.”
“How is Ding?”
“Concussed,” Ryan said. “But too hardheaded to have much damage.”
Cathy scoffed. “If that were the case, you’d be bulletproof. And the computer tech? How’s that going?”